Felix Van de Maele, Collibra, Data Citizens 22

Right before the so-called modern big data era kicked into high gear. The company was one of the first to focus its business on data governance. Now, historically, data governance and data quality initiatives, they were back office functions, and they were largely confined to regulated industries that had to comply with public policy mandates. But as the cloud went mainstream, the tech giants showed us how valuable data could become, and the value proposition for data quality and trust evolved from primarily a compliance driven issue to becoming a linchpin of competitive advantage. But data in the decade of the 2010s was largely about getting the technology to work. You had these highly centralized technical teams, and it resulted in a lot of frustration with data initiatives for most organizations that didn't have the resources of the cloud guys and the social media giants to really attack their data problems and turn data into gold. This is why today, for example, there's quite a bit of momentum to rethinking monolithic data architectures. You hear about initiatives like Data Mesh and the idea of data as a product. They're gaining traction as a way to better serve the data needs of decentralized business users. You hear a lot about data democratization. So these decentralization efforts around data, they're great, but they create a new set of problems. Specifically, how do you deliver a self-service infrastructure to business users and domain experts? Now the cloud is definitely helping with that, and run fast and loose with data initiatives, kind of like the Wild West, to find new veins of gold, it has to be done responsibly. As such, the idea of data governance has had to evolve to become more automated and intelligent. Governance and data lineage is still fundamental to ensuring trust as data moves like water through an organization. No one is going to use data that is entrusted. Metadata has become increasingly important for data discovery and data classification. As data flows through an organization, the continuously ability to check for data flaws and automating that data quality becomes a functional requirement of any modern data management platform. And finally, data privacy has become a critical made possible by Collibra, a leader in so-called Data Intelligence and the host of Data Citizens 2022, which is taking place in San Diego. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm one of the hosts of our program which is running in parallel to Data Citizens. Now at theCUBE we like to say we extract the signal from the noise, and over the next couple of days we're going to feature some of the themes from the keynote speakers at Data Citizens, and we'll hear from several of the executives. Felix Van de Maele, who is the co-founder and CEO of Collibra, will join us. Along with one of the other founders of Collibra, Stan Christiaens, who's going to join my colleague Lisa Martin. I'm going to also sit down with Laura Sellers, she's the Chief Product Officer at Collibra. We'll talk about some of the announcements a company that he sold to Collibra last year. Now, many companies they didn't make it through the Hadoop era, you know they missed the industry waves and they became driftwood. Collibra, on the other hand, has evolved its business, they've leveraged the cloud, expanded its product portfolio and leaned in heavily to some major partnerships with cloud providers as well as receiving a strategic investment from Snowflake earlier this year. So, it's a really interesting story that we're thrilled to be sharing with you. Thanks for watching and I hope you enjoy the program.

Last year theCUBE covered Data Citizens, Collibra's customer event, of programming languages like Python, the introduction of frameworks like Tensorflow, the rise of AI, Low Code, No Code, et cetera. Businesses still find it's too difficult to get more value from their data initiatives, and we said at the time, you know maybe it's time to rethink data innovation. While a lot of the effort has been focused on more efficiently storing and processing data, perhaps more energy needs to go into thinking about the people and the process side of the equation. Meaning, making it easier for domain experts to both gain insights from data, trust the data, and begin to use that data in new ways, fueling data products, monetization, and insights. Data Citizens 2022 is back and we're pleased to have Felix Van de Maele.

You bet. All right, we're going to get the update from Felix on the current data landscape, how he sees it, why data intelligence is more important now than ever, and get current on what Collibra has been up to over the past year, and what's changed since Data Citizens 2021, and we may even touch on some of the product news. So Felix, we're living in a very different world today with businesses and consumers. They're struggling with things like supply chains, uncertain economic trends and we're not just snapping back to the 2010s, that's clear, and that's really true as well in the world of data. So what's different in your mind, in the data landscape of the 2020s, from the previous decade, and what challenges does that bring for your customers?

You know, I don't know when you guys founded Collibra, if you had a sense as to how complicated it was going to get.

Well that's interesting, because you know, in my observation it takes 7 to 10 years to actually build a company, and then the fact that you're still in the early days is kind of interesting. I mean, Collibra's had a good 12 months or so since we last spoke at Data Citizens. Give us the latest update on your business. What do people need to know about your current momentum?

Yeah, you know, a couple things there. I mean, the acquisition of OwlDQ, you know Kirk Haslbeck and their team. It's interesting, you know the whole data quality used to be this back office function and really confined to highly regulated industries. It's come to the front office, it's top of mind for Chief Data Officers. Data mesh, you mentioned you guys are a connective tissue. We're going to go deeper into products later on at Data Citizens 22, but we know you're debuting some new innovations, you know, whether it's the under the covers in security, sort of making data more accessible for people, just dealing with workflows and processes, as you talked about earlier. Tell us a little bit about what you're introducing.

Yeah, a lot going on there. This is really different than what we've been used to in data, which is just getting the technology to work has been so hard. So, how do you see the future and give us your closing thoughts please?

Yeah, it's a new era. The next 10 years of data won't be like the last, as I always say. Felix, thanks so much. Good luck in San Diego. I know you're going to crush it out there.

Yeah, it's a great spot for an in-person event and of course the content post-event is going to be available.